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GideonPolya :

28 Oct 2013 10:49:16am

The Sydney Opera House is indeed a beautiful and iconic building but I thought at the time that it could have been built much more cheaply if a central, highly functional, acoustically-perfect concert hall complex had been built of fire retardant-impregnated timber surrounded by the white Utzon sails made of, say, corrugated iron on a steel framework, this paying homage to the farm shed and a major source of the money for the project.

The Sydney Opera House cost $102 million that corresponds to about $550 million in 2013 dollars and ruined the lives of goodness knows how many thousands introduced to gambling via the Sydney Opera House lottery.

One hopes that some enterprising Australian city (e.g. Geelong, Newcastle, Hobart) will take up the Polya Plan for a highly-functional Sydney Opera look-alike for a mere $50 million in 2013 dollars and located dramatically e.g. on the Derwent River.

En passant, I wrote to the authorities some years ago suggesting projection of my huge painting "Sydney Madonna" on the Opera House (Google "Sydney Madonna by Gideon Polya"). My idea was of course rejected but the sails are now routinely used for projections e.g. as recently in the projection of a highly-edited Australian naval history. A decent society would have left the "NO WAR" in blood-red on the Sydney Opera House but it was removed and the courageous, humane painters jailed (Australia has been involved in all post-1950 US Asian wars that have been associated, so far, with 38 million Asian deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation; Google "US has invaded 70 nations since 1776").